Pike Place’s iconic “Market” sign glowed primary red and the air smelled lightly of fish and flowers. Never mind the black-clad guards behind me with dogs and the small drones scanning the area around me. Just a middle-aged blond woman out for a late-spring walk. I wore a long blue coat and a tight black hat. Sunset spilled gold and umber across the glassy surfaces of the tallest buildings before I escaped to wander the city. She was quiet and clear in her speech, and so calm that it took me a while to understand that her response to her father’s death was a plan to fix the entire climate and remove all the greed and meanness from humanity along the way. The girl looked like she might be 20 now. They’d made their way west, finally finding a path to green cards here. Her mother brought her from Uttar Pradesh when she was 10, taking a cruise and disembarking forever and illegally in Florida. I signaled Susannah that she was a keeper with a nod, and turned my attention to Chandra’s story. Her voice rumbled through the room, deep and compelling. A Justice Warrior now, and once, when it mattered, Antifa. Her family had come up from Nicaragua in the late 1990s and she had been born just after they crossed the border. A reminder of the thousands of people I had never met but needed, owed. Guadalupe had worked as an organizer on my first and second gubernatorial campaigns, primarily on the peninsula.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |